Baseten

Baseten

Deploys and serves scalable AI models

Capacity Strategy & Operations

Full-Time
$190k - $235k/yr

+ Equity

Senior
San Francisco, CA, USA
Hybrid

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of experience in strategy, operations, consulting, finance, or a similarly analytical and execution-oriented role.
  • Demonstrated ability to own complex, cross-functional processes with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.
  • Strong quantitative and modeling skills, including the ability to build demand forecasts, scenario analyses, and capacity models from scratch.
  • A track record of distilling ambiguous situations into clear recommendations for senior leadership.
  • Ability to identify operational problems, build solutions, and follow through until they are working.
  • Ability to operate under pressure and in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the playbook does not yet exist.
Responsibilities
  • Own the capacity planning process end to end, including intake, triage, prioritization, fulfillment tracking, and post-mortem learnings.
  • Translate customer commitments, sales pipeline, and infrastructure growth targets into concrete GPU demand forecasts across regions, GPU types, and timelines.
  • Partner with Finance to model capacity scenarios, evaluate new supply opportunities, and support capital expenditure decision-making.
  • Work closely with the Capacity Acquisition team to align supply procurement with forward demand and flag gaps and risks early.
  • Coordinate across Sales, Site Reliability Engineering, and Infrastructure teams to resolve capacity conflicts and ensure customer commitments are honored.
  • Build and maintain the operational cadence that keeps capacity planning structured, visible, and free of ad hoc Slack coordination.
  • Develop reporting and dashboards that give leadership a real-time view of capacity health, utilization trends, and risk exposure.
  • Identify recurring operational gaps in the capacity lifecycle and drive process improvements that reduce toil and improve reliability.
Desired Qualifications
  • Familiarity with GPU infrastructure, cloud platforms, or the artificial intelligence and machine learning ecosystem.
  • Experience in a high-growth startup or Series B or later environment where operational processes were built from scratch.
  • Exposure to vendor or partner management, particularly in hardware, cloud, or infrastructure contexts.

About the company

Baseten provides a machine learning infrastructure platform for deploying, serving, and scaling AI models in production. Its Inference Stack lets teams deploy custom or open-source models as scalable APIs with features like automatic scaling, resource and version management, and observability. It supports multi-cloud deployments (AWS, GCP, or a client’s own cloud) and includes Baseten Training for containerized training jobs and Baseten Model APIs for quick prototyping. Baseten aims to simplify the end-to-end lifecycle of AI models in production by handling deployment, scaling, and management, with tiered plans to fit different customer needs.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Series F

Total Funding

$2.1B

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2019

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • September 25, 2026 brought DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and billing API improvements.
  • September 17, 2026 Base Labs partnership expanded trust for open-weight enterprise deployments.
  • Sheila Vashee joined as CMO on September 25, 2026, strengthening go-to-market execution.

What critics are saying

  • Bloomberg reported a $26 billion round in talks; failure freezes Baseten's acquisition spree.
  • Hugging Face marketplace placement commoditizes Baseten against Modal and other inference providers.
  • Hyperscalers can bundle inference, training, and storage, making Baseten a replaceable layer by 2027.

What makes Baseten unique

  • Baseten ships inside Hugging Face inference providers, reaching developers at model selection time.
  • Blaxel acquisition adds persistent sandboxes for agent code execution, tool use, and state.
  • Base Labs with Hugging Face and Goodfire defines open-weight safety standards before deployment.

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Benefits

💰 Competitive compensation: We aim to provide 90th percentile (or better) salaries and equity grants for every team member commensurate with their experience.

🌎 Remote-first work environment: The Baseten team is welcome to work from wherever they want; fully remote, in our San Francisco office, or a mix of both. We provide a $1,000 stipend for you to make your home office comfortable and productive.

🏓 Regular in-person team summits: We get together as a team three times a year to plan, workshop, and most importantly, get to know each other better.

🌴 Unlimited PTO: We ask that everyone take at least 4 weeks of vacation. And we have a company-wide break between Christmas and New Year's Day.

🏥 Full healthcare coverage: Medical, dental and vision insurance for you and your family.

🍼 Paid parental leave: 16-weeks fully paid parental leave (adoptive and non-birth parents included) and flexibility with schedules while returning to work.

📈 401(k): Company-sponsored 401(k) for you to contribute to.

🧠: Learning and development budget: We encourage you to take classes, attend conferences, and invest in your craft and we’ll cover expenses to make it happen.

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

↓ -3%

1 year growth

↓ -2%

2 year growth

↓ -4%
The Information
Sep 25th, 2026
Figma CMO Sheila Vashee joins AI inference startup Baseten

Sheila Vashee, former chief marketing officer at Figma, has joined AI inference startup Baseten. Vashee spent three years at the design software firm before departing this summer during an executive shakeup. Her exit in August contributed to a decline in Figma's stock price. Baseten is described as a rapidly growing upstart in the AI infrastructure space, though specific details about the company's recent growth or funding were not provided in the source material.

AI Cyber Australia
Sep 17th, 2026
Baseten unveils safety framework for open-weight AI models in collaboration with Hugging Face and Goodfire AI.

Baseten unveils safety framework for open-weight AI models in collaboration with Hugging Face and Goodfire AI. On Wednesday, Baseten, in partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire AI, launched a new safety infrastructure standard via its research arm, Base Labs. This initiative addresses safety concerns tied to open-weight models, which are models that can become hazardous when safeguards are removed through a process called abliteration. Hugging Face currently hosts over 6,000 such models. Key Points: * Base Labs aims to establish transparent standards for training and deploying open models, integrating safety directly rather than adding it later. * Baseten emphasizes the advantages of openness for AI safety, promoting the visibility and transparency of model behaviors. * The partnership with Goodfire aims to embed safety within open models; Goodfire focuses on making AI processes more interpretable. * Baseten and Goodfire are both significantly funded; Baseten recently raised $1.5 billion, while Goodfire secured $150 million. * Baseten is inviting contributions from the developer community to bolster this framework and ensure open models are safely accessible. The announcement is part of a broader effort to create safer, more transparent AI environments as concerns about the potential misuse of AI continue to grow.

Intelpro
Sep 17th, 2026
Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire.

Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire. Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for training and monitoring open models. Baseten launched a new safety infrastructure standard alongside its Base Labs research arm on Wednesday, partnering with Hugging Face and Goodfire AI to build safety evaluation and monitoring infrastructure for open-weight models. The announcement lands amid debate for the safety of open-weight models - which can be made dangerous by removing their safeguards through a rising technique known as abliteration. The scale of the problem is massive: Hugging Face, which hosts open source AI models, currently lists over 6,000 abliterated models. Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for training and monitoring open models. The company is framing their future work as a "standard" for open models that is transparent and built into how models are trained and deployed, rather than bolted on afterward. "We believe openness to be an advantage for AI safety," the company said on X. "Openness provides more visibility into the behavior of models and, most importantly, greater means of turning safety research into actionable and transparent controls than closed-source." The companies haven't disclosed how the partnership will work technically, though Goodfire framed the goal in a reply to Baseten's post: "Safety must be built into open models and provided by those who serve them." Goodfire, which specializes in opening AI's "black box" to explain how models make decisions, is the likeliest candidate for the "built into" part. Baseten, an AI inference provider, raised a $1.5 billion Series F in June, vaulting its valuation to $13 billion. Partner Goodfire AI is similarly well-capitalized, having raised a $150 million Series B led by B Capital earlier this year to advance its model interpretability platform. Looking ahead, Baseten is putting out an open call to the broader developer ecosystem to contribute to the framework. "Together, we are building an ecosystem of open models that are safe and accessible to all," the company noted.

CR Bookings
Sep 17th, 2026
Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire.

Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire. admin September 17, 2026 Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for... Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for training and monitoring open models.

Associated Press
Sep 10th, 2026
Baseten acquires Blaxel to power AI agents with 5x faster sandbox infrastructure

Baseten has acquired Blaxel, an infrastructure company that builds secure execution environments for AI agents. Blaxel's technology includes microVM-based sandboxes that spin up and resume up to 5x faster than competing solutions, supporting agent code execution and tool use. The acquisition expands Baseten's platform to provide integrated infrastructure where AI models and their execution environments work together. This addresses the shift from AI applications that generate responses to agents that take actions, which requires isolated, persistent computing environments. Blaxel's capabilities will strengthen Baseten's foundation for secure code execution, tool use and session persistence. The deal follows Baseten's Series F fundraise at a $13 billion valuation and its acquisition of reinforcement learning startup Parsed. Baseten builds inference infrastructure for AI applications, serving customers including Abridge, Clay, Cursor and Mercor. Founded in 2019, the company has raised over $2 billion from investors including Altimeter Capital, Greylock, IVP and NVIDIA.